Lucrezia Borgia and Nancy Drew: odd bedside companions
This week I have been haunted by “titian blondes”. It began when I picked up Gregory Maguire’s Mirror, Mirror–a re-telling of Snow White with the role of the wicked queen played by Lucrezia Borgia. Set in the gorgeous countryside of Italy and the dwarves rescued from the clutches of Disney to something much stranger, this book quickly became my favourite of all of Maguire’s re-tellings. (Although, in my opinion, the best re-tellings of fairy tales come from Robin McKinley and Gail Carson Levine.) Bianca, a pale and quiet young girl, struggles to survive adolescence, the loss of her father, and the perils of life under the eyes of the Borgias with a grace and quiet dignity that makes her rescue by the dwarves both inevitable and understandable.
Lucrezia fits neatly into the role of the wicked queen. Willful, lovely, vicious, and conniving, she slowly pushes Bianca out of her own home and condemns her to death in the forest. Saved by dwarves that she creates out of stone, Bianca is the mother creator of the story. Her ability to give life to those around her is in direct contrast to Lucrezia, who gradually loses everyone, son, brother, father, lover, to death and despair.
In an extremely odd pairing, Mirror Mirror ended up sitting next to a variety of Nancy Drew novels. Of course, they are the original mysteries, when Nancy drove a blue convertable, wore gloves, dressed for dinner, and had “titian” or strawberry blonde hair. There was a marked contrast between the two women: lush and lacivious Lucrezia and the buttoned-up apple of her father’s eye that is Nancy. That didn’t make these books any less comfortable, though. There is something charming about Nancy gaily driving up and down the countryside helping out various friends and relatives as they are robbed, conned, or intimidated with a frequency that would make anyone leary of being friends or relatives of Carson and Miss Drew.
These two women, though, Lucrezia and Nancy present two familiar types of women–the one who is dangerous because of her sexuality and the power she wields and the one who is pure and uses what power she has for the good of others. On this line, Bianca fits neatly in the middle: purer and kinder than Lucrezia, sexier and more real than Nancy. Still though, I don’t think that these books will ever sit quietly next to each other.